Bluesky has grown by 2 million users — about 15% — since Donald Trump won the U.S. election last week. But the emerging social platform isn’t just acting as a refuge for left-leaning X users who are disappointed in Elon Musk’s alliance with the president elect. A community of Taylor Swift fans, or Swifites, has also laid its foundation on the decentralized social app.
Almost 13,000 people on Bluesky have signed up with a “swifties.social” domain name, indicating their involvement in the Taylor Swift fan community. Other fandoms for artists like Beyoncé (about 900 members) and BTS (about 4500 members) have also emerged.
These fan-driven domains, which function within the main Bluesky social server, came from a project that Bluesky developer Samuel Newman made in May 2023, before he was hired by the company. (Newman was also behind the third-party client Graysky before he got a job at Bluesky.) Newman’s tool allows anyone to claim subdomain handles from a domain that you own. For example, Newman bought “kawaii.social,” which now has about 450 members. Using his tool, we could technically snatch up “techcrunch.kawaii.social” as our domain, but alas, that might not be as consistent with our brand as our current “techcrunch.com” handle.
“It’s taken off in ways I didn’t expect. I originally made the tool thinking people might want a ‘bsky.london’ handle or something like that, but it turns out that the handle is a great signal for what kind of account you are, and stan accounts absolutely love being able to self-identify themselves like that,” Newman told TechCrunch via Bluesky DM.
The swifties.social domain didn’t see much growth at first, with about 2,000 users joining until August 2024, when X was temporarily banned in Brazil.
“Bluesky got an enormous influx of Brazilian users, including many Swifties,” Newman said. “The tool went viral, jumping to nearly 8,000 handles claimed. Then, after the election, yet another wave of Swifties arrived and the tool went viral again, jumping to 12,800!”
That wave of growth from Brazilian users was when Newman added handles for BTS fans (army.social) and Beyoncé fans (beyhive.social).
In the grand scheme of things, users with these fan domains only make up a tiny fraction of Bluesky’s 16 million users (and counting). But fan communities are often what makes a social network run; in the early 2010s, Tumblr boomed in part due to fandoms for TV shows like “Supernatural” and “Doctor Who,” as well as bands like One Direction. Even if a community is small, these cohorts tend to be very active social media users, and Bluesky thus far has prided itself on its ability to maintain highly engaged users.
“We … have a higher percentage of posters than most social sites, which follow a 90-9-1 pattern of lurkers-commenters-posters. We haven’t dipped below ~30% posters,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber wrote in a post on Tuesday.